WriteToReply Recommendation to DirectGov: provide an RSS feed of consultation exercises that are linked to from the DirectGov “Public Consultations” web page.

Why do we care so much about web feeds? Because they’re connecting the web and providing ways to access, analyse and distribute information between web sites and web applications. Feed syndication and aggregation is now central to both disseminating and discovering information on the web. Web feeds extract information in a form that is convenient for readers, publishers and web developers.

Ideally, each of these individual departmental pages would publish feeds of the current open consultations being run by the corresponding department (a list of the current auto-discoverable departmental consultation feeds can be found here: autodiscovered consultation feeds), but this means of publishing appears to be the exception rather than the norm.

WriteToReply Recommendation to Government Departments: provide an auto-discoverable RSS feed of current consultation exercises from the departmental consultations web page.